Scouting and cleansing articles, e.g., for home cleaning applications are well known. Commercially available articles are often sold with soap or detergent incorporated within the article. Solid soap and detergent compositions are commonly incorporated within steel wool and other common cleansing and scouring articles. Although soaps possess the desirable properties of being slow to dissolve in water and having a sustained presence within the articles over a period of extended use, soaps typically lack one or more of the properties of good foaming, good detergency and good grease cutting ability. Moreover, the processing and manufacture of these soap containing articles requires the undesirable use of heat and/or solvents in order to adequately blend the raw materials as well as to incorporate the blended soap compositions into the cleansing article.
In order to overcome these shortcomings in the use of soaps, synthetic detergents have been used in at least some commercial scouring articles primarily because of their improved grease cutting ability and superior foaming ability. Detergents, however, are readily soluble in water and this solubility has contributed to the shortened useful life for scouring articles containing such detergents. In general, cleansing or scouring articles treated with detergents tend to lose their detergent loadings after only a few short uses or even after a single extended use. In light of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide a cleansing article with a good grease cutting detergent that will dissolve readily in water but will release slowly from the article over an extended period of time and over a number of uses.
Scouting and cleansing articles made from steel wool are also well known. Commercially available steel wool pads include the aforementioned soaps and, consequently have exhibited the above discussed problems of poor foaming, detergency and grease cutting ability. Additionally, steel wool articles tend to rust when exposed to moisture, and the steel fibers of the pad have sharp ends which can penetrate the skin on the hand of the user. Accordingly, it is also desirable to provide the aforementioned improved detergent in a form which will release in a controlled manner after exposure to moisture and which is provided on a porous pad which will not rust or exhibit other undesirable characteristics of steel wool.
Past attempts to extend the useful life of the soap or detergent within such scouting or cleansing articles have had only limited success. These attempts have varied in their approaches but have included, for example, encapsulating the soap within a pouch-like portion of the article or by blending the soap or detergent with insoluble polymers or with binders such as cellulose and derivatives thereof. These attempts have generally been less than satisfactory for several reasons. Encapsulation of the soap within the article requires a high loading of the soap, thereby increasing the cost to manufacture the article while also retaining the aforementioned shortcomings of soaps in general. The use of binders has either failed to significantly extend the useful life of the detergent or has made the detergent less available because of the nature of the binder material employed.
Accordingly, there is a long felt and unfulfilled need in the art to provide a scouring or other cleansing article which includes a controlled detergent release composition and to provide a method for the manufacture thereof. There is also a need to provide such a controlled detergent release article having a pad constructed of a material which will not oxidize after exposure to water and which can withstand a number of uses without depleting its detergent loading. It would be especially desirable to provide in such an article a slow or controlled detergent release composition which renders the detergent readily available for its intended cleansing function, providing excellent detergency and foaming over an improved useful life for the article.